Minimalist Theory of Human Sentence Processing

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Abstract

Research in the theory of human sentence processing can be characterized
by 3 styles of explanation. Researchers taking the first track have tried
to motivate principles of structural preference from extralinguistic
considerations like storage capacity in
working memory, or bounds on complexity of incremental analysis. Frazier
and Rayner's (1982) Minimal Attachment and Right Association principles,
and Gorrell's simplicity metric, are examples of this type of theory. The
second track eschews "parsing st rategies", replacing them with a fairly
complex tuning by speaker/hearers to frequency in the hearer's linguistic
environment. The difficulty of recovering an analysis of a construction
in a particular case is a function of how often similar structures o r
thematic role arrays appear in the language as a whole. The work of
Trueswell et al (1994), Jurafsky (1996) and MacDonald et al (1994) are
examples of frequency or probability based constraint satisfaction
theories. The third track takes a more represe ntational view and ties
processing principles to independently needed restrictions derived from
competence and language learning. This approach claims that the natural
language faculty is extremely well designed in the sense that the same set
of principl es that govern language learning also contribute to a theory
of sentence processing. This track is represented by the work of Gibson
(1981), Gorrell (1995) Pritchett (1992), Philips (1995, 1996) and Weinberg
(1992), who argue that processing can be seen as the rapid incremental
satisfaction of grammatical constraints such as the Theta Criterion, which
are needed independently to explain language learning or language
variation. A variant of this approach, represented by Crain and Steedman
(1985) among ot hers constrains the grammatical source for parsing
principles but locates these principles within a discourse or semantic,
rather than a syntactic component.
This paper proposes a model of the last type. We argue that a particular
version of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky (1993), Uriagereka (1998))
provides principles needed to explain both initial human preferences for
ambiguous structures and provides a t heory of reanalysis, explaining when
initial preferences can be revised given subsequent disconfirming data,
and when they lead to unrevisable garden paths. We compare our model to
other linguistically motivated theories such as Philips (1995, 1996), ar
guing that Minimalist principles subsume the generalizations captured by
Philip's theory in a more empirically adequate way. Finally, we argue
that the data presented argue for this theory over those motivated by
extralinguistic principles.
Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-53